Verbal

True, it doesn't. As I said, it's the votes of the CLPs. It took the unions (as undemocratic as they are) to bang some sense into the conference programme. Remember, the CLPs are at the core of Corbyn's 'reforms' - it's not clear that the unions will be in a position to give the veneer of common sense in future annual conferences. I personally don't mind the unions losing their influence over conference agendas - I've seen it up and close for years and it's classic smoke-filled-room stuff. But such is the state of CLPs now, which have been turned into culture-war skirmishes (hence 'Palestine'), that I don't see much of a future for a party that needs to face an electorate with a straight face.

Labour insider who's seen the numbers. Here are those numbers: https://twitter.com/220_d_92_20/status/1043900298618699778

Constituency Labour Parties' top 'priorities' ballot for this week's conference: 1. Housing 2. School system 3. Windrush 4. Palestine 5. Brexit 6. NHS 7. Welfare system So Palestine (I think they mean Israel and the occupied territories) more important than Brexit, NHS and welfare. Brilliant.

She knows what the implications are though. The government is going to fall.

This talk of 'punishment' is yet more evidence of how little we in the UK even understand about what the EU is. It is not a state, and not even a superstate. It is a legal order which exists entirely through agreed treaties between the member countries. Without those treaties it is nothing. Those treaties set out the strict rules of conduct, if you will, that those members must follow. While there's some wiggle room for opt outs (and we're not the only ones not in the Eurozone), these rules establish above all the 'four freedoms' on which the whole economy within the EU works, as well as a common regulatory framework. Anything else and those treaties fail. So it's not for the EU, or individual members, to say that we can set aide one of those freedoms just for the sake of a 'deal'. Nor can we demand access to the 'good bits' of the EU and discard the 'bad bits' (despite this being the whole premise of the leave campaign). May, the Brexit Jihadists and even the Labour party have treated the whole thing as a transactional negotiation. It isn't. It's about squaring our 'needs' (whatever that might mean) with the rules of the EU. If we'd adopted that approach at the beginning, we wouldn't be staring into the abyss now. We'd have opted for Norway + customs union, at worst. But we are where we are, and the British people are going to have to take the hit for May's ignorance and for the leading Brexiteers' hardly secret desires to massively reduce the welfare state, along US Republican lines. What the Jihadists don't say - because they lied about it on the bus - is that the biggest target of all is the NHS, which American private health companies have had their beady eyes on, and who've been negotiating with Dr Fox ever since his appointment.

Are you going? If so, what as?

You really need a history lesson. There were two supposed culprits in the execution of Jesus - Pontius Pilote and the Jews. Roman Corbyn would have hopped onto the Roman precursor of Press TV and blamed the Jews. And by the way, is there anywhere in the Corbynist cult a justification for present-day Corbyn taking money from the Islamo-fascist regime in Tehran to work for a TV station that was banned by Ofcom for forcing a torture victim of the regime to 'confess' their crimes while the torturer sat off-camera?

Quite right. What do you expect from those damned Jews? They got together and invented the whole thing. All of it. It's all a smear against the greatest Man of Peace since Jesus. And you know who killed Him, right?

Christ. Here I am agreeing with Batman against the tw atosphere.

I don't think I've heard a better, more eloquent takedown of one of Trump's key racist talking points - NFL players 'taking the knee'. Peto O'Rourke is going to go far - something of Robert Kennedy about him.

What ludicrous tosh. If you actually believe this then you really are gullibly receptive to the manipulative crap from the Putin troll factories. Most people can see through this 'why can't we see them daub the front door' nonsense quite easily.

Another one who doesn't understand the distinction between health and welfare. Why is that even surprising?

Not to mention that the EU have sworn never to go down the Swiss route ever again, for very good reasons. The upshot of all of this is that regardless of which side of the debate you're on, the UK has become a highly volatile country, where it's simply unsafe for many companies to make large investment commitments, and where it's safe to assume that many of those companies, especially those relying on JIT, will have to look ever more closely at relocating within the EU. Even Minford accepts, and even assumes, the rapid decline of British manufacturing post-Brexit. And that means, higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs will decline with it. This instability has seen the cliff-fall of inward investment, which will work its way through the economy like woodworm. The erosion of the City, as a world-leading financial powerhouse, will also slash government tax receipts by billions. Then again, there's no parliamentary majority for ANY of this.

It's utterly baffling that you cannot accept a simple demonstrable fact. And your failure enrages you so much that you stomp off in a tantrum rather than admit you're wrong. The last time I saw someone behave in quite this way was in primary school.

I hate to break it to you but the welfare and health budgets are and always have been separate. It amazes me that you've reached beyond puberty (if so) without knowing this. Here'a a breakdown of UK public spending so that you can catch up on your lost years. https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_health_care_spending_10.html

Here's how totally fu cked the British far left are. (And it hardly speaks that well of some British universities)... Anyone who's read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich will have some idea of the sheer horror of the Soviet gulag system. As a means of brutal, de-humanising oppression, used especially against dissenters, it's unparalleled - reducing people to the non-living without (some of the time) actually killing them. So here's an anonymous LGBTQ Twitter account at Goldsmith's London seriously telling us why gulags are actually a good thing for those - 'bigots' - who disagree with them (especially, I notice, a number of feminist academics who object to the bullying behaviour of some trans activists). https://twitter.com/lgbtqgold/status/1039140880731521025 Are these people actually Corbynists? I don't know. I doubt they're Blairite Red Tories though. In any case, this is truly poisonous stuff, and on a par with Holocaust denial.

Wait. So you attack my argument about welfare cuts with an image about a (fake) promise about health? You do realise welfare and health are different things entirely, right?

I suspect the one thing the headbangers do agree on is that what worked in June 2016 should work again now. So never, ever lay out a plan. Always be the opposition to everything. Never give your opponent the opportunity to see what you really have in mind. Not that any of the actual plan would have been controversial. Like sending an 'expeditionary force' to the Falklands (WTF?), building a union-jacked 'Star Wars' missile defence system (WTAF?), and giving such massive tax breaks to the rich that the only way to pay for it is basically to shut down the UK's welfare system (that one I get - it's always been the ultimate unstated aim of the financiers of Brexit).

Have you considered running for the presidency of the United States? It's just that you share patterns of linguistic incoherence with a certain someone - and his massive sense of paranoiac grievance.

Welcome back, our very own Saintsweb Schlemiel! I'm a bit surprised though that you and the other Lounge Clowns for Brexit haven't challenged Honda on how to build cars. Any thoughts? Some expertise on abandoning just-in-time manufacturing altogether, perhaps? And nothing at all to say on the Is-Jezza's-a-Jew-hater thread? Disappointing.

Some interesting facts from those nice people at the Honda factory in Swindon: Car components arrive less than an hour before they are used on the assembly line. The plant receives 350 truck deliveries of EU-sourced parts every single working day. The plant only has warehouse storage to stockpile half a day's worth of components. The loss of free movement of goods within a customs union will mean the Swindon plant will cost Honda an extra £1m to run, every single day - over a third of a billion every year. I wonder what the outcome of all that will be...?

You've read it on this thread where I've advocated the Norway option (plus customs union). But it's all too late JJ. It's Chequers or bust - and there's no parliamentary majority for either. No one can deliver anything. It's a complete stalemate, and the only way out, so the argument goes, is the mother of all fudges, in which May gets to kick the problem even further down the road. But - guess what? There's no parliamentary majority for that either.

Poverty is defined absolutely nowhere as 'people dying from hunger'. That's an absurd statement.

Leadership election, Lord Torycrap, not general. That should have been obvious, given that's what we're talking about. The wheels are just about to fall off Chequers, remember? Keep up! I'm not sure you're managing this being-a-Tory-member thing at all well - and it's such early days! And now you're a loyal Tory, and so officially dedicated to fu cking people over who are less fortunate then you, let's hear you sing the praises of your great leader. And perhaps a curtsy?

The way things have gone today, it's pretty clear there'll be an election challenge over the Chequers deal well before the November deadline. As I said, Lord Crap hasn't thought this through and he's going to have to watch impotently on the sidelines. And he's still missing an essential ingredient in the Tory party rules that's going to send his £6 down the swanny. I wonder if he can spot it.